Three Films Make A Post: The tide is turning.

Aquaman – Lost Kingdom (2023): Even though I’m not writing about the current crop of superhero movies all that often, I haven’t jumped on the superhero hate train, and “superhero fatigue” just fatigues me.

However, most everything bad you’ve read about this second Aquaman movie is unfortunately true. For much of its running time, this doesn’t feel like a proper, finished movie from a big studio at all, but the rough cut of something that doesn’t appear to even have had a finished script, with characters just dropping in and out of the plot for no good reason, no dramatic arc, and an absolute inability to sell the film’s tonal shifts; actually, I don’t even see attempts at selling them, for James Wan has apparently not just decided to direct this as if it were a TV movie, but given up on doing his job completely.

Making matters worse are special effects that often appear to simply not be finished, with many a scene that takes place in what looks like raw sets you’d find in 80’s Doctor Who serial instead of intricate greenscreen work. It’s just a complete train wreck of a movie, and not even an entertaining one.

The Marvels (2023): Also much maligned is this second Captain Marvel movie directed by Nia DaCosta. Here, I really can’t see the problems I’m supposed to notice. Sure, the film can get silly as all get-out, but most of the time, its jokes are actually funny and imaginative, and the script has no trouble shifting from this to the more serious stuff.

Unlike certain parts of the internet, I also enjoy watching a superhero movie carried by a trio of women where the male characters simply aren’t terribly important without the film making much of a thing of it one way or the other (call it the Claremont approach). But then, I am a simple man.

Detective vs Sleuths aka 神探大戰 (2022): If you’re like me, you’re missing classic Hong Kong cinema rather badly. As this extremely energetic mix of action movie and twisty thriller suggests, classic Hong Kong filmmakers do so as well, so long time Johnnie To cohort Wai Ka Fai’s film isn’t just a big damn action movie that follows many of the rules of modern blockbuster cinema to perfection and with considerable verve, but that also contains more winks and nods towards the tradition of post-80s Hong Kong cinema than you can shake a stick at, some of them very subtle, others very obvious indeed. Lau Ching-Wan playing another Mad Detective really is only the beginning there, and before the film is through, we’ll even have gone through a moment of baby juggling.

That all of this works as an absurd but absolutely riveting action film of the highest order instead of sinking into some kind of retro mire is a particularly wonderful achievement.

Victim (1999)

Original title: 目露凶光

Warning: you can’t talk about this one without spoiling large parts of the plot!

Manson Man (Lau Ching-Wan), a businessman fallen on hard times thanks to the financial crisis is suddenly kidnapped by gangsters. It’s a bit of strange case – Man’s girlfriend Amy (Amy Kwok Oi-Ming) clearly doesn’t understand what’s going on at all. There’s after all no money at all to be had from them. The police, particularly Detective Pit Kwan (Tony Leung Ka-Fai), are rather sceptical about the whole affair, even more so when they discover that Man had gotten heavily in debt with some gangsters. Though, as Amy tells it, they managed to pay it all off, so there shouldn’t be any reason coming from that side either.

Man is set free after a while, without any money having flown, but there’s something really strange about the situation: he’s left for the pick-up in a house supposedly haunted. During the police rescue, enough very peculiar things happen to suggest to Detective Kwan as well as to Amy that there may be something supernatural going on.

Particularly since Man acts very strangely after his release, in ways not terribly typical of someone who has gone through a traumatic event. It is more as if he were another person completely. Why, one might think he’s possessed by a spirit.

Though, and here come the spoilers, if the central character of Ringo Lam’s Victim is possessed by a malevolent force, it’s the spirit of capitalism rather than anything supernatural. As it will eventually turn out, Man’s not possessed, he has just turned into a very human monster. As portrayed with expected and perfectly appropriate intensity by the great Lau Ching-Wan, Man was clearly a true believer in the promises of a highly capitalist society, and suddenly had to learn that you can play by the rules you’ve been taught are the right ones all of your life, and still lose everything for no fault of your own. Which simply breaks him, and makes him willing to do absolutely anything to become rich again, leaving scruples, Amy’s love for him and basically everything that makes him human behind to plan a rather impressive crime and double-cross that needs to involve quite the bloodbath. Even before bad luck and bad partners turn parts of the plan even more bloody than Man must have thought they needed to be.

There’s really no other reading for the film than this strong and angry kind of capitalism criticism as delivered through a pretty singular mixture of horror and crime movie. This desperate scrabbling for loot of course is a thematic angle than ran through many a crime movie from Hongkong during the 80s and the 90s, when making lots of money to escape the City as long as it was still British seems to have been a central goal in the place’s culture at large. Only the body count by gun shot wounds is dramatized.

Lam in his mode of brutal realism – he can do operatic as well, but often chooses not to – is the perfect filmmaker to tackle this kind of material. He provides the film with an angry energy that from time to time explodes outwards in short and brutal shoot-outs and beatings. In these moments, the film is as kinetic as Lam’s older, classic movies in the genre, but there’s a desperate quality here the film shares with Man.

Victim’s realist approach also works well when it pretends to be a supernatural horror movie instead of a moral one. At that point in the movie Manson’s seeming possession and irrational behaviour are provided with extra heft by how grounded his surroundings feel, as well as by how much stock the clearly reasonable Kwan as well as Amy, who believes she knows Man much better than she actually does, put in it as an explanation. In the end, and rather ironically, a supernatural force driving Man to his deeds would have been the friendlier and less desperate explanation. In the Hongkong of Victim, evil ghosts are just too friendly an explanation to be real.

Past Misdeeds: The Bullet Vanishes (2012)

aka Ghost Bullets

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

China during the Warlords Era. Policeman Song Donglu (Lau Ching-Wan, doing his crazy detective bit with all the verve and charisma I expect from what might be my favourite living Chinese actor) may work in a prison, but he's a nearly superhumanly able investigator. He spends his time actually talking to the prisoners, clearing up wrongful convictions through his powers of deduction - not that this frees anyone, mind you - and learning what he can about human psychology from the inmates. Donglu may be a cop in a dirty system, but he's as humanist a man as one could imagine.

The numerous letters regarding the wrongful convictions he has written must have earned him the respect or supreme annoyance of somebody somewhere, for he is transferred to the city of Tiancheng to work on the local police force's corruption problem.

Not a man to be discouraged by little things like getting an office in the file archive in the cellar, Donglu quickly inserts himself into an interesting case, the kind of mystery he developed his talents for. A peculiar series of murders has begun in the munitions factory of a certain Mr Ding (Liu Kai-Chi, in a horribly over-done performance that doesn't jive at all with anything everyone else on screen is doing). The victims are shot by some unknown and unseen person, but the bullets are nowhere to be found. It's as if they were disappearing into thin air. So it's no wonder the workforce - held in virtual slavery by Ding - believes the killer to be the vengeful ghost of a killed worker girl who died in a game of Russian Roulette dressed up as "asking the heavens" for a verdict on a supposed crime by Ding.

Donglu, working with cop Guo Zhui (Nicholas Tse, as neutral as always acting-wise), the fastest gun in Tiancheng, and clearly a policeman nearly as clever and as interested in the cause of actual justice as Donglu is, soon realizes that Ding is the kind of guy who would cheat in a game of Russian Roulette, and that whoever commits the murders certainly does so in connection with crimes Ding committed himself. But realizing this and finding out and then proving what is actually going on are different things. Things that can be dangerous once one finds out that the local chief of police is in Ding's pocket, and there aren't many people an honest cop can trust.

At first, it's easy to assume The Bullet Vanishes to be a Hong Kong clone of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies, seeing as how the films share an eccentric and brilliant detective, some techniques of demonstrating said detective's brilliance, and a soundtrack style. However, once the film gets going it becomes clear that director Law Chi-Leung was certainly taking inspiration from the modern Holmes movies yet is wise enough to be doing very much his own thing with it. Which, as much as I enjoy Ritchie's pulp action mysteries, really is as it should be.

Law's film keeps inside the genre lines of the pulp mystery, with the mandatory - and excitingly done - chases and shoot-outs, the contrived murder method that can only be understood through just as contrived and very entertaining investigation techniques, and a damn boring romance sub-plot between Nicholas "I may win prizes for best actor but you sure wouldn't notice" Tse and Yang Mi as terribly cute fake soothsayer Little Lark (some women really know how to wear a 2012 idea of a 1920s hair cut is all I'm saying) who unfortunately share not an ounce of chemistry.

Despite the very uninvolving romance that feels shoe-horned in from a "blockbuster writing 101" checklist, I'd be perfectly satisfied with The Bullet if it did only repeat the expected genre beats in its own enthusiastic and accomplished fashion. However, Law is a more ambitious filmmaker than that. Consequently, Bullets goes through some mood shifts reminiscent of a style of Hong Kong film made thirty years ago, with tragedy and serious discussions of ethics as much on the program as detecting, shooting and a bit of silliness. The more po-faced aspects of the movie didn't work quite as well as I would have wished for, with some of the more melodramatic moments feeling not quite as well built up to as they should have been, and the discussion of political ethics coming somewhat out of the blue. However, I prefer a film like this that attempts to add something more to genre formula filmmaking and not quite achieves it to the more harmless and riskless kind of movie; at least when the not quite achieved ambition does not ruin the rest of the movie, which it doesn't here. Plus, it's nice to see a Hong Kong film that doesn't shy away from agreeing with a humanist view of people even though it is willing to respect other perspectives. There's none of the unpleasant respect even for corrupt authority that is en vogue in Hong Kong cinema since the Takeover to be found in the film, either - after all, these bad guys are Warlord Era capitalists, so there's surely no connection to contemporary China (or America, or Germany) here, right, Mister Censor?


While I and many of my Hong Kong cinema loving peers have written many sad words about the descent of Hong Kong cinema already, if you watch the right movies, the old lady still has some life in it beyond whatever Johnnie To directs in a given year. More importantly, there still seem to be filmmakers like Law Chi-Leung willing to do interesting and at least somewhat ambitious things inside of very commercial genres without looking down on them or their audience. The wild years of Hong Kong cinema may be long over, but films like The Bullet Vanishes are proof that there's a good chance that the second decade of the slick years of the city's cinema can still produce films very much worth watching and thinking about. Like Lau Ching-Wan's character in the movie, I choose to remain hopeful.

On ExploderButton: The Bullet Vanishes (2012)

aka Ghost Bullets

Blah blah, Hong Kong movies aren't what they once were, blah, blah, Takeover, blah.

While I was bloviating about the sad state of Hong Kong cinema, I nearly missed out on this very fine pulp mystery with (the eternally glorious) Lau Ching-Wan and the (eternally boring) Nicholas Tse that may smell a bit like Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies but really has other interests at its core.

Click on over to the all-new, all-exciting ExploderButton to read more of my words about the movie.

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